He said during his presidential campaign that he favors more nuclear power despite his opposition to the Yucca Mountain repository in Nevada as a storage site for nuclear wastes.
Frank von Hippel, a former advisor to President Jimmy Carter who stopped previous reprocessing programs three decades ago, said he thinks the current partnership program will end in an Obama administration.
"The emphasis on the United States building a nuclear reprocessing facility should die, and I believe it will die under President Obama," said Mr. von Hippel, co-director of the program on science and global security at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School. "There is no urgent reason to do this and, for now, I believe we can safely store spent fuel in dry casks at the reactor sites until we have better and safer technologies."
TVA, DOE PARTNERSHIP
U.S. Rep. Zach Wamp, R-Tenn., a member of the House subcommittee on Energy and Water, said he favors nuclear reprocessing and thinks East Tennessee can play an important role in developing the technology at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Any reprocessed fuel could generate power for TVA at an existing plant or potentially at a proposed fast reactor plant on the Clinch River, the site of an abandoned DOE breeder reactor project from the 1970s, he said.
Rep. Wamp prefers any reprocessing facilities be built in either South Carolina or Idaho, rather than in Oak Ridge.
"If you really want to reduce our carbon footprint, the single greatest step is nuclear energy," he said. "The only liability is what do we do with spent fuel. The Oak Ridge National Laboratory can demonstrate at the micro level the reprocessing of that fuel. TVA can demonstrate on the macro level how that can be done within an energy system."
TVA and the Department of Energy signed a memorandum of understanding in April to work on the development and testing of new technologies.
Jack Bailey, a senior vice president of TVA and chairman of a Nuclear Energy Institute task force working on standards for a reprocessing demonstration project, said the industry is working toward a one-step licensing process for new plants similar to what the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is using for new nuclear reactors.
Mr. Bailey said reprocessing nuclear fuel can reduce the volume and toxicity of spent nuclear fuel while recapturing more of its energy. Spent fuel from America's nuclear plants now would fill a football field 10 yards deep, but it could be reduced to wastes filling only one end zone, he said.
"We're not talking about a lot of volume, considering we've been producing nuclear power for more than 30 years," he said. "But it could be a much smaller volume if we are able to reprocess the fuel."
Mr.
